"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever" wrote George Orwell in 1984. But if you want a vision of a Tory future, imagine Peter Bone, the Tory MP for Wellingborough, waving his penis in your face - for ever".
Brexit cheerleader Bone remains, for now, a member of the Conservative party and sitting MP despite independent recommendations for him to be suspended due to having been found to have committed various acts of bullying and sexual assault on a male member of his staff. Including one in which his own 'male member' was waved in front of his victim's face.
What is it with these fuckers? They take nominative determinism to the next level. There's Bone - waving his bone about, Chris Pincher - literally going around pinching people, and then there's Boris Johnson who appears to put his 'johnson' into any young intern that moves. Although should he, unlikely - I admit, be reading this I'm merely suggesting he was having some very strenuous IT lessons.
When The New Statesman aired back in the late eighties/early nineties, Rik Mayall's Alab B'Stard was a grotesque caricature of a corrupt and cruel Tory MP. He'd probably be kicked out of the party for being a pinko now. If anyone wanted to revive, or reboot, the show then calling an MP a B'Stard wouldn't work now. It's too soft. He'd have to be called something like Rishi C'ntface or Jacob Rees-W'nkstain.
Watching the recent Tory party conference in Manchester (and not least Priti Patel and Nigel Farage dancing at the GB News disco - the GB News disco must be a song title Morrissey considered before going for The National Front Disco) I was reminded, not for the first time in recent years, of the quote from the American political scientist Francis M. Wilhoit:- "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect".
In The Guardian a couple of weeks back, the estimable Rafael Behr wrote that "the Conservatives have embraced the {coming} spirit of opposition with the arrogance of a party that is used to being in government. The conference in Manchester was a festival of complaint about the condition of Britain undisturbed by contrition for having presided over its decline. Taxes are too high, they say, and borders are too porous. International human rights treaties are too binding; teachers are not doing enough teaching; police are not doing enough policing; there are too few doctors and too many civil servants. Children spend too long on their phones; benefit claimants are too lazy; speed limits are too low. The Tories don’t like a country that is shaped by thirteen years of their rule but prefer not to take responsibility."
No policies of any real meaning were announced - and the meagre ones that were will probably not happen anyway because if this lot of Tories can be relied on to do one thing it is to not deliver on their promises and pledges. Let's take the HS2 fiasco.
Billions of pounds of taxpayer's money pissed away on a high speed train from London to Manchester and Leeds that now won't go to either Manchester or Leeds - and won't even go to the centre of London. What a waste of money. So much for levelling up. I hope those in the north will respond correctly to this mess by kicking every single brick of the red wall down in the next election.
The gap left by lack of policy and delivery has been filled with blatant lying. Following Sunak's lies about meat taxes and having to have seven bins, we've had Mark Harper (the Transport Secretary) lying that local councils are enforcing rules about how many times people are allowed to visit the shops. Considering his job, and considering the big issue of the time, maybe he could have answered some questions about transport, about HS2, while in Manchester intead. He ignored them all and made up some lies so he could attack straw men. With such a Trumpian approach to politics, he's clearly a future star.
Another Tory MP, Gillian Keegan - the Education Secretary who is keen on boasting about doing "a fucking good job" despite fears that concrete blocks are in danger of falling on kids' heads in hundreds of schools on her watch) going on about Derek Hatton who was the Deputy Leader at Liverpool City Council between 1983 and 1986 and so has not been seriously involved in politics for thirty-seven years.
Toryworld is an upside down world where proven liars and lunatics are taken seriously. Liz Truss is still taken seriously, Boris Johnson is still taken seriously, and Rishi Sunak is still taken seriously (long-term decisions for a brighter future my arse, short-term decisions for a shiter future more like). Suella Braverman is warmly applauded by a room full of Conservatives for getting up and doing an Enoch Powell cover version. When Braverman spoke of a "hurricane of migrants" anyone with any sense of history was able to see a direct echo of Powell's infamously racist Rivers of Blood speech in Wolverhampton in 1968. The Tories kicked Powell out back then. Braverman will not be kicked out and may well be their next leader.
The leasder of a party that would welcome back, with open arms, Nigel Farage. Farage wouldn't even look extreme in this party so far to the right have they shifted. Yet a very strange version of right wing politics where judges are being told not so send convicted burglars and rapists to jail because the jails are already full to bursting. I've always thought that two things that made a person unsuitable for public office are incompetence and cruelty to others. This current iteration of the Tory party is full of high ranking ministers who manage to combine both those two traits almost to perfection.
That's why people are turning their backs on them in droves. On current polling, only 1% of 18-24 year old plan to vote Tory and just 12% of under 50s. The Tories are a party that will soon die but they may, as tends to happen with horror films, come back for an even more disturbing sequel. Suella Braverman. Kemi Badenoch. Lee Anderson. Your time has come. Let's end with another quote from Rafael Behr about what a 'funny' lot the Tories are(n't):-
"Nothing about it is funny as long as the Conservatives are still in office and able to dictate the terms of national debate. There is something corrosive of democracy in the obligation to take seriously a party that has given up on serious government. And there is something disturbing about a regime that is too ridiculous to trust with power yet is too powerful to be written off with ridicule."
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